Of Her Time: Bethenia Owens-Adair, Pioneer Doctor & Devoted Eugenicist.

The American West in the mid 19th century made profound demands on all those fated to experience it. The cost for even momentary lapses of vigilance was often death, and the people raised under the intense pressures and expectations of this time and place were a hard lot - self-sufficient almost to a fault, capable of feats of endurance and application that beggar belief today. Competence and self-reliance on that scale, however, usually comes at a steep cost. Having done so much yourself through what you believe is the sheer force of your own will, it is often all too easy for such individuals to see anything less than everyday heroism as a failure of character springing from deep and fundamental problems that could impact the survival of a community. To such people, the rhetoric of Exceptionalism was often an alluring one, and along with it the grim flip side of Exceptionalism, Eugenics. 

Today we look back at the American fervor for eugenics of a century ago and wonder how it was that, in a land so theoretically devoted to the freedom of all, there was so much readiness to restrict the freedom and future potential of individuals born A Certain Way. But popular it was, with magazine surveys in the early 20th century regularly reporting majority support for policies advocating the sterilization of the “unfit”, especially in the West, where the rhetoric of Hardy Individualism was of necessity in full force. 

Our figure of interest for today, Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair, was a devoted and active eugenicist. She also flung the gates open for women to practice medicine in Oregon, and was a pillar of the suffrage movement there. All of those things, those that we continue to value, and those we have, as a society, long since left behind, were present within the hard scrabble confines of her person, and it is a journey indeed to see how that constellation of beliefs and abilities came to be. 

She was born on February 7, 1840 in Missouri but in 1843 her family joined one of the early wagon trains out west for the Oregon territory, arriving in Clatsop county at a time when Portland was still a ramshackle clearing known as Stumptown. The watchword of the Owens family was industry, and her parents raised her to have a keen eye towards any opportunity from which profit might be wrung through a judicious application of labor. Her father was a sheriff and businessman whose sound speculations built up a cushion of prosperity that would repeatedly come to Bethenia’s rescue, while her mother was a diminutive powerhouse who saw that nothing went to waste in the Owens household. 

Bethenia was taught profitable skills like cheesemaking and sewing, rather than being given any sort of formal schooling, and like many girls of her age, was married off young to begin her own family. She was married to Mr. Legrand Hill some three months after her 13th birthday, and two years later she gave birth to her son, George. As depicted in her memoirs, Legrand was a shiftless layabout whose lack of drive, genius for bad speculations, and perpetual dithering on matters of importance squandered everything that her industry and her father’s generosity brought into the household. On top of this, he was physically abusive to both her and their son George, and she ultimately made the decision, after her health had been steadily worn away by the poor living conditions caused by Legrand’s inability to build on the opportunities repeatedly thrown his way, to divorce him. At the time, a woman’s ability to divorce her husband on grounds not related to adultery was dependent on the state she lived in, but Bethenia took her case to court, and not only received her divorce, but her child, and the right to change her name back to Owens, though the social stigma of having obtained a divorce would follow her in the years to come.

Free of Legrand, Bethenia now set about the task of ordering her life according to her own beliefs and talents, and here her tirelessness and gift for thrift came into their own. She took as much work as she could to stockpile as much money away as she could so that she could own her own home and provide her son with stability and whatever opportunities he might need. She washed clothes for wealthier families, took opportunities to teach that came her way, attended primary school classes to fill in her education in spite of the embarrassment of sometimes learning lessons next to literal children, and eventually hit upon the idea of going into millinery, attracted by the profit margins of taking fabric scraps that could be had essentially for nothing and changing them into hats that, by staying on top of fashion, could fetch a pretty penny. 

Her millinery business boomed, helped by her trips to San Francisco to study new techniques and trends, and eventually she had enough money saved up to buy herself something that she had long desired: a medical education. Family members and friends thought it utter madness to put a perfectly profitable business on hold to chase after a career that many in society still deemed shameful for a woman to pursue, but she would not be talked out of her decision, and so made the long trek across the country at the age of 31 to study at the Philadelphia Eclectic School. Eclectic medicine, with its focus on botanical and herbal remedies, was in vogue at the time, standing alongside water treatments and homeopathic medicine as semi-respectable alternatives to scientifically established medical practices, and when she returned to Oregon, Owens set about creating a profitable and successful medical practice combining the procedures of these different schools, with the “electric bath” being one of her most profitable ventures. 

Once again, Owens had built up a profitable business from nothing by dint of hard work and study, but she was still not satisfied. She yearned for the sort of degree that would allow her to practice the sort of medicine she read about in journals, that would allow her hands to perform surgeries that would save lives, and so, once again, she put her business on hold and set out East in 1877 with the goal of studying at Jefferson College, where one of the nation’s greatest surgeons, Samuel David Gross (1805-1884), was a professor. Meeting with Gross, she found him supportive of her cause, but deeply skeptical about whether the College would allow a woman to attend classes. He advised her instead to go to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where women had been admitted since 1870.

In 1880, Owens received her medical degree and, after a tour of Europe and its medical institutions that drained the last of what she had saved from her old medical practice, she returned to Oregon, to rebuild her practice on solidly scientific lines, without the electric baths. Once again, she found herself wildly successful, her skills being sought out by patients across the state. And she would need that money, for in 1884 she remarried, to colonel John Adair, a man not quite so unpromising as Legrand had been, but still possessing a strong bent towards large scale speculation that would drain the financial reserves Bethenia was attempting to build. Worse, his primary speculation was the reclamation of a soggy wetland in the hope that the railroads would eventually run through the land, an enterprise which compelled Bethenia to live for years in a climate that took a steady and persistent toll on her health. 

To improve her health, but still be near to John, she made what she later called “one of the greatest mistakes of my life” when she chose to settle in Astoria, Oregon, a community far too small for her to have a significant practice of any sort, compelling her to accept any work that came her way, including a number of calls that put her in peril of her life. For eleven years, she slogged on with this existence, practicing medicine when she could while rheumatism took a steady toll on her body until finally, in 1898, she was compelled to stay in Yakima, Washington, with her son, to regain her health. The combination of family, climate, and opportunity to practice medicine on a significant scale convinced her of the necessity to relocate there permanently, a decision which she informed John of upon her return.

The twentieth century, then, saw Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair with a coast-wide reputation in her profession, financially stable, and, as ever, over-working herself because that was, at her core, who she was. These were also the years that she moved more fully onto the public stage, taking up her pen on multiple occasions for the causes she believed in. In the 19th century she had been involved in the Temperance movement, as were many women doctors of the era who had to repeatedly treat women who had been the victim of their husbands’ alcohol-fueled violence, and in the Suffrage movement, as one might expect of an individual who had grown up around strong women role models and weak male counterparts, but in the 20th century she turned increasingly towards eugenics as her cause of choice, writing her first article on the subject in 1904 for the Oregonian. She turned talk into action a few years later, arguing strenuously for a sterilization bill to be passed in Oregon, and in 1910 authoring a full book on the subject, Human Sterilization: Its Social and Legislative Aspects, which contained not only reprints of her own articles and a detailing of her battles with the Oregon legislature to get eugenics laws passed, but also the full texts of other states’ sterilization statutes. 

Her efforts culminated in the passage of House Bill 69 in 1913, which was repealed but returned in 1917, and was only finally cast aside in 1983, after some 2,648 eugenicist sterilizations were performed statewide to keep people possessing undesired traits from reproducing (this was the 9th highest total in the 20th century, California being the top state for forced sterilization, with some 20,000 cases). This legacy was precisely what Bethenia Owens-Adair wanted to happen, and worked to make happen - her hope was to create a perfect society, free of physical and psychological defects, and the method she considered the most humane to do that was through a program of forced sterilization, and in all of this she was not remotely alone during her era.

Owens-Adair passed away in 1926 at the age of 86. Her life began three years after the invention of the telegraph and ended one year before the first talkie film. Her first memories were of wagon trains cutting paths through wilderness on their trek westwards, and her last days were spent among the bustle of automobiles and the glitz of the Roaring Twenties. She is a Presence in history, full of the character traits of her times, which led her both towards the unqualified success of her medical career, and the overconfident adoption of enforced sterilization of the less-than-perfect as humanity’s road forward. There is much to learn in lingering over the details of her life, not just about how the virtues of her era carried with them a host of darknesses, but about ourselves - are we really so confident that, a hundred years hence, our most common ideas won’t seem the height of barbarism? And if we are not, if we would like the future to grant us the flaws of our humanity as it exists within the limited perspective of our time and treat us as people worth remembering on occasion, perhaps we should grant something of a similar grace to Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair, and say simply that she was utterly of her era, as limited by its prevailing intellectual constructs as she was aided by its rigid expectations which gifted her the willpower to push through adversity but also the arrogance to pass unilateral judgment on those born without her biological and cultural advantages, and to tragically pull her peers and state along with her in that judgment.

FURTHER READING:

Owens-Adair’s memoirs are available in an invaluable volume from Big Byte Books (I know) which also contains a host of her other articles, including pieces on famous women from Oregon history, prohibition, and, of course, eugenics. She is a good writer, and her tales of pioneer life in the Oregon territory in the 1840s and 1850s form a fascinating time capsule of that era from a unique point of view. Her book on sterilization is almost impossible to find an original copy of, but it has been digitized and is available here on Archive.org, and as much as it is a rough read it contains a positive treasure trove of documents about the history of eugenics in the United States which I have found valuable in teaching the section on eugenics in my AP US History classes.